Reflections
The holidays are at our doorstep - along with family and friends. The relationship between parents and their offspring often becomes a central issue in literature, in film and in our daily lives. Certainly close family ties resonate when the holiday season takes over our lives. A friend confided recently that she felt depressed because her family was so small while others boasted of the hoards of their loved ones coming to dine and celebrate. My friend's "small family" meant her son, his wife and their two daughters. To me that sounds like a perfect opportunity to enjoy one another's company without the exhaustion and tensions of the extended family descending at one time.
I have sometimes wished that I had a daughter or two. At some indeterminate moment, the center of the family get-togethers often shifts from mother to daughter. Our family is exceedingly small. In addition to Howard and myself, celebrations include my son, Ron' my grandson, Jeremy; and less frequently, my brother and his wife.
Over the years, I have lost close family members, so holidays tend to bring sad memories. There are times, though, when our small group relaxes and enjoys the extra intimacy, as happened last Passover when only Ron was able to join us. While I missed other family and friends, I noticed that the atmosphere allowed us to be more at ease, to be open to nostalgia and the sharing of our feelings, which is less likely to happen in a large, noisy gathering.
On other holidays, I particularly remember my mother, the out-and-out matriarch at all family gatherings. Because she spoke so softly, everyone had to lean forward to hear her stories, too often an opportunity to deliver paeans of praise to her children. I have seen her quiet a vocal relative with an imperious look and a graceful gesture of her lovely hands. She had so much wisdom to impart.
My relationship with my mother created countless small rebellions in me that I didn't dare give voice to. This ambiguous kind of love mixed with resentment seems to characterize many mother-daughter relationships. I could not bring myself to see "One True Thing" with Meryl Streep since I had wept through the book of the same name by Anna Quindlen.
Ellen, the daughter, tells of her sacrifice when her father asked her to come home and care for her dying mother. Ellen's painful journey to awareness becomes the most important theme as she realizes that her mother's life had a beauty in simplicity different from her own of intellectual intensity. Because of the heartfelt insight of the writing, I was captured and pulled into the sorrow and the deepening love between mother and daughter.
Years ago, I had read "Beloved" by Toni Morrison and marveled at the tender, passionate beauty of the writing. When we went to see the film, the agony of a mother's love gripped me and left me shaken and bereft. The beautiful daughter, the Beloved of the title, so terrifying in her ghostly return to life, aroused conflicting emotions of pity and antipathy.
Somehow in Quindlen's and Morrison's minds this psychological push-pull between mother and daughter allowed them to write with power and magic about the worst moments of any woman's life. As a mother and daughter, I shared the pain; as a writer, I could only shake my head in a mixture of awe and joy.
What a strange way to enter the holiday season. Actually not so strange when one realizes that family gatherings are opportunities to examine the wisdom of the past, to enjoy the splendor of the season and to accept the possibility that a new year will bring us closer to those we love.
Charlotte K. Jarmy , a Los Altos resident, supervises teachers at Stanford University and is a free-lance writer.